Good Man Friday (27 page)

‘Don't rule out throwing in the river,' said January. ‘An unweighted body might stand a good chance of being washed up on a mudflat, but between the Treasury, the Post Office, and the canal docks this town is hip deep in unguarded building-stones. You can steal a stone during the daytime but the body has to go into the river at dead of night, when a wagon is noticeable—'

‘Always supposing the constables are sober.' Chloë looked up from polishing her spectacles. ‘But you're quite right. Bodies are found every day in the back alleys of Washington …'

Including Davy Quent's
, January reflected, with an inner sigh for the loss of bacon and eggs. It was the only regret he could yet feel for removing the man from the world, and that, he supposed, was the point of the penance.

‘The crux of the question,' Chloë went on, ‘seems not so much who murdered M'sieu Singletary, but who would want to obliterate all trace of him?'

‘Exactly.' January leaned against the door jamb. ‘Anyone kneeling at poor M'sieu Pomercy's graveside for fifteen minutes with his back to the church could dispose of the pen and the card case. It's safer than the river – scavengers work the mudflats, you know. But why would you? Why not sell them, unless it was to prevent any chance of recognition? That doesn't sound to me like the act of a stranger.'

‘They do say, don't they,' put in Poe, ‘that something like half of all murder victims know their killer?'

‘I should certainly be happy to murder at least half of the people I know.' Chloë put her spectacles back on.

‘But poor M'sieu Singletary knew no one in Washington,' pointed out Dominique. ‘Or almost no one. Myself, I cannot picture M'sieu John Quincy Adams slugging him over the head and burying him in the garden.'

‘For one thing,' added Chloë reasonably, ‘the servants would see, not to speak of Mrs Adams. Although Mr Adams is quite strong enough to lift a big man's body unaided.'

‘Really?' Minou's beautiful eyes widened. ‘That is strong – it's getting so I can barely lift Charmian, she's grown to such a big girl! And him President of the United States!'

‘Former President,' Henri corrected.

‘I'd like to see Van Buren sling a corpse about,' remarked Poe. ‘He'd be the sort who'd pay someone else to do it, I expect … and then pay three times as much in hush money.'

‘And that's precisely the problem.' January lifted his hand to retrieve the attention of his erratic fellow sleuth-hounds. ‘Whether you bury the body in the woods or throw it in the river with a fifty-pound segment of the United States Treasury building attached to its feet or cut the flesh off and burn it – in which case you still have the bones to worry about, as well as tell-tale smoke and a tremendous amount of firewood to be accounted for … All those problems go away if you just kill him and let him lie. So why didn't they?'

‘In this town,' mused Poe, ‘it can't be from fear of arrest.'

‘No.' January let the word sink in. ‘No.'

‘If he had been ambushed in the woods—' began Minou, and even as she said the words her voice tailed off.

‘I suppose you could drag him into the woods to bury him,' pointed out Henri. ‘But you would need to bring a shovel out there with you. And if you buried him anywhere near the road, you'd run the risk of encountering Mr Fowler and his merry men lying in wait for some poor Negro. You'd certainly run the risk of
them
coming upon an informal grave and peddling its contents, and according to Brother Pease that hasn't happened.'

‘The problems multiply further,' continued January, ‘if the murder took place at whatever hotel or boarding house Singletary was staying at …'

He sat silent for a moment, turning over again the thought that had come to him as he'd stood by the canal that afternoon.

‘What if Singletary isn't dead?' he asked.

In the startled silence, Octavia Trigg's heavy tread creaked in the hallway: a squeal of door hinges, a murmur of voices, then the landlady's step retreated into the big parlor opposite …

‘You mean he's fled?' Henri frowned. ‘But
why
?'

January shook his head. ‘We know almost nothing about the man,' he pointed out. ‘The only person in Washington – in the country, apparently – who knows him well is Mr Oldmixton, who seems to be running a spy ring—'

‘You'd believe the word of a man like Pease?' Henri's pale eyebrows shot up. ‘Or Fowler, for pity's sake?'

‘I don't suppose the Secretary of State would,' agreed January. ‘Or whoever it is who's in charge of trapping spymasters. Oldmixton sounded extremely concerned about Singletary, but that may just mean that he's as skilled an actor as you are, Marse Eddie …'

‘He'd scarcely be a successful spy if he wasn't,' observed Chloë. ‘And it does put a different context to M'sieu Singletary's fears for his life. Mrs Bray could have dropped some remark about Oldmixton over tea that revealed the extent of Singletary's danger … But if he is alive somewhere, why hasn't he retrieved his notebook?'

‘Perhaps he's being held prisoner?' suggested Dominique, eyes aglow.

‘My dear Minou, where?' asked Henri sensibly. ‘In the attic of the Ministry? The man's been gone for six months! You can't keep someone locked up for that length of time without the servants suspecting something!'

‘Only four years ago,' January pointed out, ‘a very respectable Creole lady in New Orleans was discovered to have been keeping seven slaves imprisoned in her attic and torturing them daily, and nobody in town was the wiser.'

Henri turned pink. ‘That situation was rather different.' The Viellards were related to the respectable Creole lady in question.

‘And there are people locked in pens and back rooms not fifty feet from the Capitol,' added Dominique, her voice very soft, ‘and kept drugged, some of them, so that they do not cry out over the walls to passers-by that they are free men.'

‘Well, my dear –' Henri looked excruciatingly uncomfortable – ‘one can hardly think that poor Singletary has been kept in blackface for six months.'

‘In any case,' added Chloë, ‘who in their right mind would have hired Singletary as a spy to begin with, when they have so many more useful villains like Fowler skulking about? By all accounts he doesn't sound capable of finding his way around Washington unaided, much less—'

‘An asylum,' said Poe.

They all looked at him.

‘A madhouse. Whoever had him admitted drugs him – which solves the problem of getting him into a vehicle – and arranges with the doctors there to keep him drugged. The mad have no more rights, and their protestations of wrongful imprisonment are no more heeded, than those of slaves. Of course a slave will proclaim that he's really free, and of course a madman will claim that he's actually sane … You've described the man as being eccentric in his behavior—'

‘Is there a madhouse hereabouts?' asked Chloë.

‘Alexandria,' said January at once. ‘Run by a man named Gurry.'

Still struggling with the idea, Henri repeated, ‘But think of the risk! Why not simply kill him?'

‘That's something we don't need to know,' said January. ‘What we do need, right now, is to ascertain whether he's actually there, and if he is, how to get him out. Because whoever put him in,' he went on grimly, ‘you can be sure that it isn't under the name of Singletary.'

There was a practice game that evening, out in the meadow by Reedy Branch. An even larger audience turned out to watch than last night, and a larger percentage of that audience, January noted with uneasiness, was white. He spoke to both Darius Trigg and to Charlie Springer – who as head of the local Prince Hall Masonic Lodge knew most of the free colored population of the District and a large number of the slaves – and gave them a description of Selwyn Singletary.

‘Deke Bellwether works as a cleaner for Gurry, doesn't he, Charlie?' asked Trigg.

‘He lives out in Alexandria, but he's in the choir of my church. He's one of the basses – got a voice that fills the hall. He said he'd be here today … Here's our boy,' Springer added, waving as Mede Tyler strode through the long grass from the direction of Connecticut Avenue, still in the neat white jacket of his waiter's costume and carrying his rougher clothes, and the bat that Fip Franklin of the Centurions had whittled for him, in a bundle. At his approach, a half-dozen white men separated themselves from the edge of the crowd, teamsters in plug hats and corduroy jackets. With a prickling sensation on the back of his neck, January started in that direction, trailed by Trigg and several others. As they got closer January saw that several of the whites had clubs in their hands, and one of them, what looked like an ox chain.

‘Think you're good enough to be playin' a white man's game, boy?' one of them called out as they spread in a line between Mede and the playing field.

‘Want to see what kind of games white men really play with uppity fookin' niggers?'

Mede paused, moved to his left to go around them, and their line stretched to meet him.

‘One thing just makes me retch, it's a nigger that don't know his place …'

January reached Mede's side. The players – Stalwarts and Centurions – grouped around them, unarmed, but outnumbering the whites three or four to one.

‘We're just out here to play a little ball, sir,' said Trigg, in his most pleasant voice. ‘It's just a game. I'm most sorry if our friend spoke out of line to you.'

The man with the chain spat tobacco on to Trigg's foot. ‘Your friend is breakin' the goddam law,' he said. ‘It's against the law for niggers to play ball. Against the law for niggers to assemble. There's one thing I can't stand, it's a law-breakin' criminal nigger—'

‘There's one thing I can't stand,' retorted a soft voice as the whites – who had begun to close in around them – parted. Kyle Fowler slouched forward, tall and dirty, with two of his own ‘boys' at his back. ‘And that's a man that makes a bet and then tries to fuck with the contest beforehand. You bet on the Warriors, O'Hanlon?' His voice was soft and high, almost womanish, his eyes expressionless a reptile's.

Without answering the question, O'Hanlon spat into the grass again. ‘These fookin' niggers are breakin' the law.'

Fowler looked over at the crowd around Mede, then back at the whites. ‘Shame on them,' he said. ‘You want to come down to the station house and swear out a complaint. I think Constable Jeffers has money on that game, too. He'll want to hear what you have to say.'

January's hand closed silently around Mede's elbow, drew him back into the crowd, which closed around them like water. As they walked back toward the worn square of the playing field, he said softly, ‘If Fowler wants to arrest us – are those fellows with him part of the police-force? – he'll come over. I take it the Hibernian gentlemen have bet on the Warriors like he said?'

‘They wouldn't be trying to stop Mede if they'd bet on us,' returned Trigg grimly. January could feel Mede shivering.

After a moment Trigg added, ‘It's a goddam
game
!'

‘No,' said January quietly. ‘It's the honor of America.'

That evening's game – a practice match against a scratch team of mixed Knights and Centurions – wasn't notable for anyone's good playing after that. The one exception was Mede, whom, it appeared, very little could shake once he got into the thrower's circle. Most of the men – waiting for trouble of one kind or another, either arrest by the constables with Fowler, or attack by the Irish teamsters who'd bet on the Warriors, or even the outbreak of general riot between those teamsters and the Abolitionists – could barely hit the ball, and no wonder, reflected January. Watching Mede in the worn patch of grass, he was struck with how exposed the young man looked, and his eyes went to the line of trees that bordered one edge of the field.

‘Would you send a man over there?' he whispered to Trigg. ‘It'd be an easy shot, for someone with a rifle.'

‘It's a goddam
game
—'

‘I'll go.' Preston jogged away in that direction.

A few minutes later Noyes came to where the Stalwarts stood, with the news that O'Hanlon and his boys had taken themselves off. ‘Fowler and Roberts – that's the assistant constable with him – are still here,' he said softly. ‘They say Constable Jeffers has a couple thousand bet on the game, besides a percentage of bets he's brokered for just about everybody in the ward. Lots of men don't want to admit they've bet on black men to beat white ones, but with Bray still out of play – he's one of the best strikers the Warriors have – it's pretty clear you boys are going to win.'

‘A win is never clear.' Trigg turned from watching Mede – with the effortless perfection of a machine – put out yet another Centurion, and the men started to come in from the field. ‘That's what games are. Not something to make you scared to play them.'

January was the striker for the next round and missed the ball totally. With his mind still running on the O'Hanlons of the world, and rifles in trees, he doubted he could have hit a watermelon on a tabletop. He took his place in right field – where he could do the least harm to his own team's cause – for the few minutes it took Mede to put out the next striker, and when he came back toward the line of boxes, he found Charlie Springer there, with a short, jolly-looking man with features that January identified as Ibo.

‘This's Deke Bellwether, Ben,' Charlie introduced them. ‘My choirman, who works out at Gurry's madhouse.'

‘Dr Gurry be first to correct you, sir,' replied Bellwether, in a deep voice like black velvet and the slurry, profoundly African English of the coastal islands. ‘It a Asylum, he say – a place for people for to take refuge.'